America's moment of truth

Andrew Rawnsley, The Observer's political columnist, spends his time scrutinising Westminister. But last week he travelled America to watch the presidential hopefuls prepare for this week's crucial Super Tuesday primaries. As Republicans and Democrats battle to produce their candidates for the White House, he asks: will the new dawn promised by Barack Obama survive the brutal politics of the two party machines?

The contrast was compelling. George W Bush went up to Capitol Hill to deliver the eighth and final State of the Union address of a failed presidency already eclipsed by the intense contest to succeed him. His spinners might speak of Bush's final months as a 'sprint to the finish', but the ritual applause of Congress fooled no one, not even members of his own party. This is a deeply unpopular president hobbling into the sunset. All the Democrats can agree that he has been a disaster; all the Republicans can agree that they'd really rather not talk about him.

The real excitement took place a few miles away, a few hours earlier, in a sports arena at Washington's American University. Before a young, multi-racial and delirious crowd, Barack Obama was being anointed as the new John F Kennedy. JFK was no saint, but a link to the legend can add lustre to any Democratic aspirant to the presidency. When Bill Clinton was first running for the White House, his campaign's favourite photograph was of a teenage Bill having his hand shaken by JFK.

Obama is too shrewd a politician to make the boast that he is the heir to Kennedy. After all, the freshman Senator from Illinois was barely out of nappies when JFK was assassinated. But he has to be pleased when others make that claim on his behalf, and gladder still when the crowning is conducted by the members of the Kennedy family.

They didn't simply endorse him; they presented him to the whooping crowd as a reincarnation of the lost leader. JFK's sole surviving child, Caroline Kennedy, a rather shy speaker and the more effective for being so, said that she saw in Obama her father's ability to offer 'hope and inspiration'. Ted Kennedy, the septuagenarian warhorse of the liberal wing of his party, paid tribute to Obama's 'grit and grace' and roared: 'I feel change in the air!' He deployed his rich baritone to declare that 'with Barack Obama we will turn the page on the old politics of misrepresentation and distortion, we close the book on the old politics of race against race' - a swing at the Bush era that was also a stinging slap at the Clintons for dealing the race card off the bottom of the deck.

As for the candidate, he had yet to speak and the infatuated students were already chanting: 'O-Bam-A! O-Bam-A! O-Bam-A!' As they draped the mantle of Camelot on his elegant shoulders and placed the Kennedy crown on his sticky-out ears, Obama lost the struggle to look humble. He grinned like a cat that has just been given the keys to the dairy.

You can never be sure that a good candidate is going to make a good President. What you can observe is that in terms of rhetorical ability he is qualified to mount the pulpit of the presidency. Having just been compared to one of the great orators, he couldn't afford to disappoint the crowd by delivering a duff speech. And he didn't. It contained an affecting personal anecdote about how his father had made the journey from Africa to America with financial help from an education fund set up by JFK. On his way up to his rhetorical peak, Obama placed the election in his preferred frame: 'The choice is not rich versus poor, young versus old, and it is certainly not black versus white. It is about the past versus the future.'

These tropes now sound a bit stale in the ears of the reporters who have been accompanying him for months, but the fresh eye can see why he rouses crowds to a genuine exuberance that you so rarely see in contemporary politics, here or in Britain. For a noon rally, some of them began queuing at five in the morning. So many wanted to get in, the overflow room overflowed. The young crowds who go into rapture at these rallies may well be starry-eyed, but his is the only campaign generating genuine excitement. With it is coming a surge of cash. His campaign managers say they banked more than $30m in January from mainly small donors - a quarter of a million of them. That will pay for TV advertising in the crucial states. He's not only got into their hearts. He's got into their wallets. He also picked up a useful endorsement yesterday from the Los Angeles Times

It's hard to define charisma; you just know it when you see it. JFK had it. Ronald Reagan had it. Bill Clinton has it. Hillary Clinton wants it, but can't achieve it. As for the Republicans who are still in this race, John McCain is crisp and can be charming but is also wooden, while Mitt Romney sounds slick and comes over as insincere.

When the gods were handing out charisma, Obama was spoilt with an extra large scoop. The only heckles to interrupt his speech were cries of: 'We love you Obama!' Not all the voices were female. On the newscasts that night, Obamania stole the spotlight both from the State of the Union and all his rivals for the presidency.

The endorsement of the Kennedys was another booster rocket on his sensational trajectory from interesting novelty to serious candidate to be America's 44th President. From his win on the snowy plains of Iowa, via Hillary's comeback in New Hampshire to his crushing victory over her in South Carolina, he has been on a fantastic roll.

Abraham Lincoln spoke in his first inaugural address of 'the better angels of our nature'. The essence of Obama's appeal is that he speaks to the better angels of America's character. He romances that side of this nation which sees itself as idealistic and inspirational. After years in which its politics have been disfigured by ugly sectarianism, Obama has been tapping the desire to believe that what divides Americans can be transcended by what unites them.

At Hillary Clinton's rallies, she wonkishly details the government programmes she would use to put America right. Obama's campaign has reams of position papers, but his speeches rarely touch on the concrete. They are all about the oratory of uplift, urgency and unity.

Detractors in rival camps sniff narcissism and you can see why. There was a rally later in the week in the Kansas oil town of El Dorado. He was there to highlight the other branch of his family tree by visiting the home town of his white maternal grandfather. As he wrote in The Audacity of Hope, he has 'relatives who resemble Margaret Thatcher and others who could pass for Bernie Mac'. It is more accurate to say of Obama that he would be the first mixed race President of the United States.

'I believe that the dream we share is more powerful than the differences we have,' he told that Kansas crowd, 'because I am living proof of that idea.' All candidates claim they will revive The American Dream. His unique brag is that he is The Dream made flesh.

Politics should be about dreams, but it is also - and nowhere more so than in America - about machines. If the extraordinary journey of Barack Obama is to finish at the White House, The Dream must now prevail over The Machines.

The contest has moved on from the early skirmishes in a few individual states and become coast-to-coast war. Small town politics is giving way to a frenetic struggle across time zones. Twenty-two states go to the polls on Super-Duper Tuesday, among them such delegate-rich territories as California, New York and Illinois.

Given the unpopularity of their party, the contenders for the Republican nomination should be fighting only for the privilege of coming second to the Democrat in November. The Bush era has left the once formidable Republican machine discredited and fractured. Testimony to that is the dizzy way in which contenders to be the Republican nominee have risen without trace and then sunk the same way.

The most humiliating flop has been that of Rudy Giuliani. Once, and for many months, the pollsters' favourite in the Republican race, the former Mayor of New York flamed out last week after a horribly misjudged campaign left him coming in a poor third in Florida. 9/11 had given him a national fame as Mayor America which he hoped to parley into national power. That, in part, was his downfall. He relied far too heavily on being Mr 9/11, banging on about the event that made him a global celebrity to the rising ridicule of the media and the clear irritation of many voters who wanted a prospectus for the future not reminders of the past. He spent more than $40m to acquire a grand total of one convention delegate. Mike Huckabee, the Bible-belting former governor of Arkansas, is another burst bubble. He is still hanging in there, but to win now he will need a miracle as great as any in the Good Book.

The fight for the Republican nomination has now got down - and down is the word for it; dirty is the other - to a slugfest between McCain and Romney. They locked jaws when they debated in a vast hangar housing Ronald Reagan's Airforce One at his memorial library in California last Wednesday night. The Senator from Arizona and the former Governor of Massachusetts were sat within spitting distance. And spit they did, exchanging accusation and counter-accusation of mendacity and dirty tricks. Romney ridicules McCain as a very old man in a hurry who will 'say anything to become president'. McCain sneers back at Romney that he will say everything to be President. 'He has been entirely consistent,' McCain likes to mock his rival. 'He has consistently taken two sides of every issue, sometimes more than two.'

They don't just scrap over the issues. They fight even more viciously about what each other has said about the issues. They cannot even agree on what the issues should be. For McCain, the paramount concern is the threat of Islamist extremism, a subject which plays to his reputation on national security. For Romney, the most pressing issue is the stuttering economy which plays to his curriculum vitae as a tycoon.

The eye-gouging between Republicans is a tremendous spectacle. A party that used the 'wedge' politics of fear and hate against its opponents is now riddled with those toxins itself. For all that, it would be foolish to simply dismiss the chances of another Republican following Bush. They won a presidential election they were supposed to lose in 2000. They did it again in 2004. If they pick McCain, they will have a candidate with a known ability to reach out to moderate and swing voters, not least because he has an image as a maverick and a man of principle.

Image is an important word in that sentence. The Vietnam vet may be an ideological heretic to some of the Republican Right - he's against torture and thinks we should be worried about global warming - but to a European eye he is a rock-ribbed conservative. He's anti-abortion. He's against deficits. He says he'll keep American troops in Iraq for 100 years if that is what it takes.

For all his self-styled 'straight talk', he's also shown a willingness to stoop to conquer. Romney is winded and whiney about the blows below his belt he's been dealt by McCain. If the Senator is prepared to tear the throat of a fellow Republican, he will go for the jugular of any Democrat. The past tells us that Republicans excel at the character destruction of their opponents.

That threat is central to the case made by Hillary Clinton's campaign that she should be preferred over Barack Obama. Her allies say that she has been through the fire while Obama has yet to feel the heat of a single negative ad. In the past few days, he has even got the endorsement of the New York Post, Rupert Murdoch's tabloid, which arouses the suspicion that Republicans are only kissing Obama today the better to crush him later. When the battle between the parties is joined, the right-wing press and pundits will suddenly recall his youthful dabbles with cocaine, his relationship with a property developer indicted for extortion and fraud, and dredge every swamp for any slime to paint him as unfit to be President.

That is one reason why Hillary, in her role as the dream-deflater, calls her rival for the Democratic nomination a peddler of 'false hope'. In the account of her camp, Obama is hopelessly naive and his supporters are recklessly deluded if they believe he can beat the American Right simply with glittery rhetoric about consensus.

If he didn't appreciate before how nasty American politics can get, he should know now. The Clintons themselves have administered that lesson. I heard Bill Clinton make a speech which included the hilarious claim that his current vocation is 'post-politics'. The lie to that was given when the former President turned attack dog for his wife. He outraged many liberal commentators and members of his own party by trying to devalue Obama's triumph in South Carolina by likening it to Jesse Jackson's victories there in the Eighties. In other words, he's just another black guy winning black votes, it's down to the colour of his skin and not the quality of his arguments. It was - and it has been seen as such - an attempt to ghettoise Obama as the black candidate he has never wanted to be. The Clintons' dabbling with racial politics caused a tremendous backlash within the ranks of their own party. It spurred Ted Kennedy - who had angry phone conversations with Bill - into his endorsement. It also prompted the Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, who once dubbed Bill 'the first black President', to back Obama.

I caught up with Bill Clinton at a rally in southern New Jersey, a state with a lot of delegates at stake this Tuesday. The event illustrated why the former President is both his wife's greatest asset and her most enormous liability. Finding myself there early, a magnificent chrome-and-red diner lured me off the highway and in for breakfast.

The diners knew that the former President would soon be in their neighbourhood, but it wasn't the accomplishments of his time in the White House, 'the time of peace and prosperity' that is always lauded at Clinton rallies, that interested them. One entertained his mates with Bill impersonations. The munch of waffles was accompanied by the droll drawl: 'I did not have sexual relations with that woman.'

Up the road, in a college gym, the crowd for the Hillary rally was warmed up with some rock and pop. Sting sang: 'Every little thing she does is magic.' Amid the vast bank of television cameras waiting for Bill, one of the cameramen from a local station sniggered to his neighbour: 'If everything Hillary does is magic, why did Bill...?'

However much the Clintons might like everyone to have amnesia about it, Americans still remember the grotesque soap opera into which his presidency descended, its darkest hour when he was impeached for lying to a grand jury about his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

Clinton's claim to his party's respect is that he is the only Democrat to have given them two terms in the White House since FDR. The New Jersey event illustrated the strength the Clintons have in the party's establishment. One after another they took to the stage to endorse Hillary: a black female state senator was followed by a trio of white males, the speaker of the state legislature, the governor of the state and the chairman of the state party, who took a swipe at Obama by saying: 'We need a President who doesn't need on-the-job training. We need a President who is ready to go.'

Then came the Pit Bill Terrier himself. People have been asking: if Hillary can't control Bill during the campaign how will she keep him on a leash if they get back into the White House? Bill was a bit muzzled at this event, though he took a bite at Obama for his lack of experience in dealing with international crises or domestic affairs. 'You don't have to wonder what Hillary is going to do.' The charge of inexperience is certainly Obama's most vulnerable flank. He wants to be President when he has only been a Senator for three years.

Mark Penn, chief strategist of the Clinton campaign, has an explanation for why Obama appeals more to the educated while his candidate gets the support of those at the bottom of the heap. Affluent voters are more seduced by personality. After all, they can afford to be. Struggling voters are more focused on policy which will look after their interests. 'The egg-heads have become the jug-heads,' is Penn's neat phrase for this inversion. 'The jug-heads have become the egg-heads.'

Bill lauded his wife as the 'proven change-maker'. It was 'Hillary thinks' this and 'Hillary believes' that. Only occasionally did he lapse into 'I' or 'we'. But it's a bit late to put the Billary thing back in the bottle. His prominence in her campaign has raised several spectres. One is of a co-presidency. Would America be voting for Hillary's first term or Bill's third, the third he might well have won despite it all had the Constitution not forbidden him from running again? And if he is not going to be a co-president, what is he going to do all the long day, the First Laddie roving around the East Wing with time and interns on his hands?

The funniest, and most unintentionally revealing, part of Bill's performance came towards the end when he got into a nostalgic riff about his time as Commander-in-Chief. 'Think what being President is like,' he invited us. 'They play a song every time you come into the room. You don't have to sit in traffic - you just zip along in a bullet-proof limo. You don't have to commute to the office. You live in the nicest public building in America. You have an aircraft so cool that they make movies about it.' He so misses it.

It is part of the myth of America that anyone can be President. For the past 20 years, it's been true that anyone can be President so long as they are called Bush or Clinton. If Hillary spends two terms in the White House, family dynasties will have commanded the Great Republic for more than a quarter of a century. At an Obama event in New York, I saw a placard with a potent slogan. It simply said: 'The White House is not a time share.'

At the end of the week, the two contenders were brought face-to-face at the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles. The Hollywood audience would appreciate that both put in performances worthy of serious consideration for an Oscar as they pretended to like and respect each other. They sat next to each other at a table, taking their turns to speak, looking sideways as the other performed, laughing at each other's little jokes, like a male-female newsreader combo who can't stand each other, but have to wear smile masks in front of the cameras. Instead of exchanging venom, they tried to do something much nastier. They viciously competed to out-nice each other. Hillary's compliments to Barack were designed to make him sound like her junior. He helped her into and out of her seat, projecting himself as a gent and nudging the audience to remember that he is a 46-year-old man and she a 60-year-old woman.

They sparred a bit on policy, but there is really not all that much daylight between them. Both would have a more multilateralist approach to the world, both would leave Iraq, both have a plan for health care which would look very different once Congress had got its teeth in, both would find better uses for money than Bush's huge tax breaks for the stupendously rich. 'They are more of the same,' Hillary said of the Republicans. 'Neither of us, by looking at us, is more of the same.' That's true enough. It will be a first for America whether she is the first woman to be a major party's presidential candidate or he is the first African-American.

In the polite version of this election, America has moved beyond judging candidates on their pigmentation or the shape of their reproductive organs. In the truer account, gender and race will count. As Michelle Obama told CNN on Friday night: 'Race is always, in this country, still on the table.' There is only one black face in the Senate: Obama himself. The first credible female candidate for the White House happens to be the wife of a former President.

Gender and race matter. The unknowable is how much they matter. People rarely admit to pollsters that they are misogynists or racists. I watched the Clinton-Obama debate on a big screen with a youngish crowd in a swanky, large and heaving bar in Upper Manhattan. In this fairly affluent company, no one thought - or, which is a slightly different thing, wanted to think - that skin colour would be a problem for Obama.

'We're over that,' insisted one Asian guy. One young white woman reckoned that gender was a larger handicap for Hillary: 'I'm from Texas and they hate her there. They hate her because she is a Clinton and because she is a woman.' And it is not just in the south that Hillary sparks the most visceral passions. When the New York Times endorsed her, the readers' mail ran 50 to one, and virulently so, against the paper's choice.

Leaving this young, well educated and colour-blind crowd, I caught a cab. The black driver had roughly three decades on the Obama debate partygoers. He had a recording of the debate playing on his radio. He did think race would matter. 'It's about electability,' he opined. I had found quite the political analyst behind the wheel of this Yellow Cab. 'This is a deeply racist country. They will vote for a white woman before they will vote for a black man.'

Because they are close on policy, the contest has become about identity, history and character. In the debate, Obama said: 'What is at stake is whether we are looking backwards [that's you Hillary] or whether we're looking forward [that would be me].' Clinton replied that voters needed to be careful to elect a President who could cope with 'all the problems that we know about and the ones we can't yet predict [not some rookie Senator who can make a pretty speech].'

Voters, her husband has said, would 'roll the dice' if they chose Obama over his more tested wife. The truth is that both represent risk. Hillary is a polarising figure hauling a freight train of baggage who will give Republicans something to unite against. The gamble with Obama is that he is not so much a candidate as a wave - and waves eventually break.

Of all the candidates this Tuesday, he is potentially the most transformative president for a country thirsting for a change from political failure, poison and gridlock. Would he be a 21st-century JFK? In some ways, you would actually hope not. Before we get to find out, Americans have to decide whether they prefer dreams or machines.